After leaving the hotel, we headed to my neighborhood. As I've told you all before my neighborhood is about authentic Korean as it can get. We started at the galbi restaurant by my house. Which is absolutely delicious!
You walk in, take your shoes off at the door, and go sit on the floor at your table. We had the galbi which is beef that has been marinated for a long period of time. They bring out a ring of burning charcoals and stick it into the designated hole in the table. Then comes the meat! There's a nifty pipe that hangs from the ceiling takes the smoke out of the building. My favorite description of this is "The Snuffalufagus" pipe (gotta love Sesame Street)!
Along with the meat, you get the numerous free side dishes that include kimchi, pasta salad, radish (not the radishes you and I know), and some other stuff I can't remember. Oh and did I mention that this whole dinner only cost $15.00 total! I love Korea so much!
After leaving the restaurant, my Korean friend, Alfred, called and wanted us to hang out. We headed over to his neighborhood, Hoegi, which is 10 minutes by bus from my house. My Korean friend was hanging out with 3 of his Korean friends who spoke very little English. We were a bit worried how the night would turn out but we ended up having a blast. Alfred did quite a bit of translating for us but by the end of the night we were speaking or 12 words of Korean and using hand gestures and everyone seemed to understand each other. It's amazing how uncomplicated things become! We were the first foreigners that these Koreans had ever been around so they were super nervous.
We were at this bar called "Dorothy's Diary" which gives you your own room with and air conditioning to eat and drink in. Pretty amazing! We broke out some card games and they taught us Korean drinking games. It was a blast. I definitely want to hang out with them again.
Here's a cultural tidbit for you. Since Korea is a Confucian society everything is about respect. You have to give things to people with two hands and there's lots of rules that we foreigners don't know about and I'm sure we break often. Another is no one can pour their own drinks. It's consider extremely rude. On that I noticed this night was the Koreans turning away from us when they drank. I guess it shows respect (obviously) to someone you hold in high regard, is older, or is in higher rank than yourself. Kind of interesting. I tell you...there are so many rules I could not even possibly begin to type them all out for you!
Oh and you've probably noticed me throwing the "Peace Sign" in my pictures. I've heard different schools of thought on this but some people say it means "V" for Victory. That's the one I'm sticking with cause it just sounds cool!
No comments:
Post a Comment